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Of all the kinds of printing available, split fountain is without a doubt my favourite.

If you’re not familiar with the process… Typically when printing, a single colour only is used in each ink fountain (pictures to follow), and while gradients can be printed using modern process colour printing – the standard mix of cyan, magenta, yellow and black found in your average home/office printer – printing methods like letterpress are typically limited to solid colours as a wooden or metal block stamps a colour into a stock, a method which doesn’t allowing blending of multiple densities and layers of ink.

By blending inks directly in the fountain, split fountain printing allows for some wonderful effects in letterpress and screen printing which otherwise wouldn’t be achievable, combining blends of colour with the more exotic stocks and debossing effects that aren’t available with standard offset printing.

I recently travelled to the USA and as fate would have it, I was fortunate enough to be in Los Angeles for the annual printers fair at the International Printing Museum. If you get the chance, I highly recommend visiting a future fair.

When in the preliminary stages of a graphic design project involving print, people often contact me asking something along the lines of “How much for 1,000 business cards”. While it might seem that many business cards are more or less equal, there are a dozen factors which dramatically affect the cost of printing, and without knowing more about your desired outcome answering the question accurately can be tough.

While it’s a reasonable assumption for clients to make that the cost of putting ink to paper should not vary much, different outcomes can require significantly more labour on behalf of the printer and also need additional equipment to achieve the desired result.

While “book learning” is all well and good, in my opinion nothing beats hands on experience.

While undertaking my studies in graphic design years ago and learning about printing – the printing equipment itself, printing processes and how to prepare print ready artwork for clients – by far the most useful information wasn’t learnt in the classroom, but when volunteering for work experience at a printing house.

As a graphic designer and a bit of a whiskey connoisseur, when visiting the bottle-shop for a treat I often find myself wandering around, browsing the logos, labels and packaging design in the whiskey section.

Collected here are a few of my favourite whiskey logos, labels and packaging. (No promises on the quality of the drink for all you whiskey fans out there.)

As a client, you’re probably not going to be well versed in the different file formats commonly associated with graphic design and their different purposes. After all, that’s one of the reasons why you’ve hired a designer.

Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to clients being given work in a file format that, while it may be suitable for the project they’re currently working on, is not going to be usable in future projects.

Many of the same questions come up time and time again from design students and fledgling graphic designers. Questions that rank high on the list often revolve around deadlines, charging clients, and how to manage potential clients who have unreasonable expectations.

How to qualify potential clients goes a long way in addressing all 3 of these issues, finding the right clients, and not wasting time on dead end leads.